As Amy and run around like silly people packing up to head back to Boulder tonight, I stumbled upon two fantastic posts on the web.  Consider this your daily reading if you read nothing else.

The first is titled Five Life-Changing Mistakes and How I Moved On by Julie Wainwright.  Julie is now the co-founder of SmartNow.com but is infamous for being the CEO of Pets.com.  Her post is personal and phenomenal.  She identifies five mistakes she made leading up to and during the simultaneous failure of Pets.com and her marriage.  She then describes – point by point – how she moved on.  The mistakes follow; you’ll need to click through to her article to see how she moved on. (Thanks Heidi).

1. Allowed others to define

The NY Times has a great short article up titled The I.B.M. Acquisition Machine: A Seller’s Perspective.  It has several quotes from Pierre Haren, the co-founder of CEO of Ilog which IBM acquired on Monday for $340 million.

I’ve been involved in the sale of two companies to IBM.  While a brief article, the comments Haren makes ring 100% true with my experience.… Read more

It could happen before you expect it.  I read a lot of science fiction and have been fantasizing about the opportunity to jack into cyberspace for a long time.  We are getting one step closer with our latest investment in EmSense.… Read more

I wish it were as simple as "the weather."  After 27 days in a row of rain (ok – we had sun for part of two days), the sun finally came out today.

I’ve been coming up to Alaska in the summer for about 15 years.  Amy grew up here and after we started going out together it seemed like a trip to her home state was in order.  I grew up in Texas, so after putting up with the "if you cut Alaska in half Texas would become the third largest state" jokes, I took a trip and immediately fell in love with the place. 

There are many magical things about Alaska.  Everyone here has a story.  The scale of things is unbelievable.  When… Read more

Mark Cuban has a brilliant post up titled How to Jumpstart the Economy – Tax Free Small Businesses.  He totally nails it.  Send a copy to every politician you know.… Read more

I had a week of "a book a day" where every single one I read was great.  I’m now slogging through an "ok" book (The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism) so I thought I’d take a break and write quick reviews of the excellent ones that I have read lately.

The Last Lecture: Wow.  Randy Pausch is just incredible.  A well known CMU professor with a great zest for life, Randy was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer in September 2006.  He broke into the mainstream with his awesome lecture titled "The Last Lecture" which was the final lecture he gave at CMU.  It’s a riveting 76 minute lecture that the book was subsequently based on.  Both are worth every second you spend on them. … Read more

Amy insists I’m the Good Knight so we’ll call this a good night for the Dark Knight.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.… Read more

I love it when my dad writes about personal history on his blog.  He’s a great storyteller and is extremely articulate about living and growing up in a generation that seems very very far away from today, as well as very far away from the generation I grew up with.

His post titled Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund Summer Camp 1950 made me smile an enormous smile.  I can totally see my scrawny 12 year old dad surrounded by these huge guys from the Red Hook District in Brooklyn, being scared shitless but keeping it all inside, and winning them all over on the ball field.

Love ya dad.… Read more

Fred Wilson – my friend and co-investor in Zynga – titled his post on Zynga’s $29 million financing Raising The Stakes so I couldn’t resist titling my post Doubling Down.  And I’ll echo what Fred said – I’m amazed with the hand that Mark Pincus (Zynga’s CEO and founder) has and am delighted to be sitting at the table playing it with him.

Zynga just announced that Kleiner Perkins has led a $29 million round that includes new investor Institutional Venture Partners and the old investors (Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, and Avalon Ventures.)  Bing Gordon from KPCB has joined the board – Bing recently joined KPCB and was previously the chief creative officer at Electronic Arts where he had been a key executive since 1982. … Read more

Since last summer I’ve been talking about comments as the Dark Matter of the Blogosphere.  I use Intense Debate* for the comment system on my blog and have learned a lot by experimenting with it. 

In the past six months comments have moved to the forefront of the discussion around user generated content.  While the various new commenting systems that have emerged have played a part in this, I think the broad activity around systems that enable small bursts of user generated content (Twitter, BrightKite*) and systems that aggregate a wide variety of user generated content (FriendFeed, SocialThing*) are playing a huge role in this and more "comment-like" data is being generated all over the Web.

One of the investment themes I’m most… Read more

Having just finished reading George Soros’s latest book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means my brain is now full of his theories around reflexivity.  I have always instinctively agreed with Soros’s philosophy even though I find it incredibly difficult and chewy to work my way through (but that’s true of all philosophy for me.)

I’m a great fan of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which, according to my friend Wikipedia, "is the statement that locating a particle in a small region of space makes the velocity of the particle uncertain; and conversely, that measuring the velocity of a particle precisely makes the position uncertain."  Wikipedia suggests that this is often conflated with the Observer Effect (when you observe… Read more

I’ve got some fun things for you to do this Monday morning (or at least to put on your schedule to do.)

Want to learn how to run?  How to Go From Sedentary to Running in Five Steps.

If you are already running, join the Gyminee Running Challenge or Gyminee Weight Loss Challenge.  Or – join me on Gyminee in my Lifehacker inspired six week program to do One Hundred Pushups.

Developing software for your iPhone?  Check out iPhoneDevCamp Colorado on 8/1 – 8/3.

Like 37 Signals?  Jason Fried is talking at the Oriental Theater in Denver on July 31st.

Defrag is starting to heat up.  Eric has a post up in response to the "tech has gotten boring" meme that is making… Read more

My friend Larry Nelson who with his wife Pat runs w3w3.com interviews me periodically.  I’m always happy to talk to Larry – he’s a tireless reporter on the Colorado entrepreneurial scene.  His most recent interview with me happens while I am reclining on my red coach downstairs in my house in Homer, Alaska.

Note the blue sky in the background.  It’s gone now, but it was here for a few days.… Read more

My Sunday morning online scan of the New York Times turned up an awesome Op-Ed by Frank Rich titled It’s the Economic Stupidity, Stupid.  It’s a scathing (er – "fucking brutal") criticism of McCain and his total lack of understanding of "the economy", how it actually works, and what he would do about it were he to be president.

While Rich takes a few cheap shots (hey – it wouldn’t be a political Op-Ed without some gratuitous things) I think it’s right on the money.

At the end, Rich makes a good argument for Michael Bloomberg as the VP Candidate.  He also dismantles Carly Fiorina as a potential VP and suggests Romney would be a slightly less bad idea.  I can’t imagine either Fiorina or Romney as… Read more

It’s unusual for a founder to write a long thoughtful post on the failure of his company.  Roger Ehrenberg – the co-founder of Monitor110 – which shut down earlier this week, did just that on his outstanding post titled Monitor110: A Post Mortem.  The post is oriented around Roger’s "seven deadly sins":

1. The lack of a single, "the buck stops here" leader until too late in the game
2. No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
3. Too much PR, too early
4. Too much money
5. Not close enough to the customer
6. Slow to adapt to market reality
7. Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board

Every person in every company that I’m involved with should read… Read more